Music

Dame Janet Baker performs Dido’s Lament, Glyndebourne (1966)

Leave a comment

Dido and Aeneas is a Baroque opera by English composer Henry Purcell, composed around 1688, and based on Book IV of the Aeneid, the Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the second decade BCE, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy to found a city and become the ancestor of the Romans.

Book IV recounts how his ship, en route from Epirus to Sicily, is blown off course and lands on the shores of Carthage in North Africa, where Aeneas falls in love with their queen, Dido, and she with him. However, Aeneas is reminded by the gods of his destiny and he must dutifully depart for Italy, leaving Dido in despair at her abandonment.

The opera culminates with its most famous aria, When I Am Laid In Earth, popularly known as Dido’s Lament, wherein Dido slowly dies of a broken heart.

Here, we will enjoy Dame Janet Baker performing the role of Dido at Glyndebourne in 1966. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest expositions of tragedy in modern operatic history. The lament is divided into two parts: the “recitative” which sets the scene, and the aria which follows and leads us to Dido’s death. Here we will cut to the aria. Dido’s sister, Belinda, her face radiating a deeply-felt empathy, springs forward to support Dido both morally and physically. Now watch Dido begin her lament. Here’s the libretto by Nahum Tate:

When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

The music is in G Minor, the ultimate key for expressing sadness and tragedy, and the bassline (passacaglia) repeats as if in waves of despair, descending, like Dido, toward the grave. Janet Baker has been quoted as saying: “if the Fates are with you, the magic will descend”; they must have been with her here: her manipulation of the vibrato and legato, her bearing, the genuine pathos – the scene is mesmerising.

With superb silent support from Sheila Armstrong as Belinda, Baker’s immersion in the role is absolute and all-consuming. Take a look at 1:49 and again at 1:56, at the end of the words “Remember me”, and note her head and throat momentarily sag with anguish. Her legs give way at 4:12 and the ladies-in-waiting, in unison, take a fearful step forward. The lament now descends chromatically, semitone by semitone, as Dido descends inch by inch, dead, to the ground.

The repeated phrase “Remember me” is wringing with sentiment; it is no surprise to find Purcell’s music to the lament used at Remembrance Day services around the country, to poignant effect.

Dame Janet Baker in Dido’s Lament
Music

The John Barry Seven, James Bond Theme (1962)

Leave a comment

It’s interesting that James Bond theme songs are remarkably recognisable as such. They share certain stylistic elements and motifs that clearly signal their association with the famous franchise, and it’s all thanks to the involvement of one son-of-York, John Barry, who was by far the biggest contributor to Bond scores and theme songs. Of all the Bond themes, the first and most famous – and the one then regularly used in subsequent films – is that written for Dr No in 1962. The original score was actually composed by Monty Norman (though this was disputed by John Barry) but most notably arranged and performed by John Barry and his orchestra.

The score was a masterpiece of expressive film music and established a clear template for the quintessential Bond theme: unnerving orchestral chords, raunchy brass, clashing cymbals and of course that zesty surf rock guitar played by Vic Flick. Flick played his famous riff on a 1939 Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe electric guitar plugged into a Fender Vibrolux amplifier. Its interplay with the orchestral instrumentation produced a thrilling soundtrack that managed to encompass and express the sinister world of the spy, just perfect for the new film. The song ends just as thrillingly on that single Em/maj9 chord so famous it’s known as the “James Bond chord”. If you’re a guitarist, you might find it fun to reproduce this final chord yourself…it’s this:

Barry went on to score ten more Bond films, but this original score is the one that everyone instantly recognises as the Bond theme. Here’s the version recorded for single release by the John Barry Seven, reaching number one on 1st November 1962.

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore perform Pete and Dud at the Zoo (1966)

Leave a comment

Monotonal cod philosopher Pete and deferential sidekick Dud deliver an archetypal dialogue in the reptile house at the zoo. This is one of the so-called “Dagenham dialogues”, featuring “Pete and Dud”, popularised on the show Not Only…But Also, first aired in 1965.

Coming out of the heady iconoclastic success of the satirical stage revue, Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore embarked on what was originally intended to be a solo project, Not Only Dudley Moore, But Also His Guests. However, having invited Peter Cook to appear with him in the pilot, the success of their double act quickly led to Cook joining the show permanently.

The dialogues between the flat-capped comedy creations from Dagenham presented Peter Cook with the opportunity to ad-lib and creatively explore the myriad comic possibilities of his character. His ability to sustain long periods of straight-faced comic ramblings that oftentimes bring Moore to the brink of corpsing hilarity, adds a wonderful comic tension to the dialogues. Ever alert to Moore’s struggle to stay in character, Cook enjoys ramping up the comic surreality in order to crack Dud up.

The duo’s relationship was always a bit edgy, but their partnership fell apart during the marathon tour of their two-man show Behind the Fridge, in the early seventies, and they never worked together on a regular basis again, save for some albums and shows featuring the less-than-edifying “Derek and Clive” characters. A flawed bromance they may have been but it’s preferable to remember the good times, and at times those good times were comedically sublime.

Cook and Moore
Film, TV, and Theatre

Kenneth Branagh’s St Crispin’s Day Speech, Shakespeare’s Henry V (1989)

Leave a comment

The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) was a series of wars between England and France involving England’s claim to the French throne. In the campaign of 1415, England’s Henry V sailed for France and besieged the fortress at Harfleur, capturing it in September. The English army then marched across the French countryside towards Calais, only to be intercepted by the French army near the village of Azincourt. Henry’s troops were exhausted, hungry, sick, demoralised, and pitiably outnumbered (according to some estimates, by some 36000 to 9000 troops).

It didn’t look good. Henry needed to rouse his men for battle like never before, and he gave them a speech which not only roused them, but spurred them to a victory that would resound throughout the ages as the famous Battle of Agincourt. It was the morning of October 25th (St Crispin’s Day).

That Henry’s speech occurred is agreed by historians to be a factual event. However, it was left to the creative imagination of William Shakespeare, two hundred years later, to envisage Henry’s words and compose the über-galvanising “St Crispin’s Day Speech” that has come down to us in his play, Henry V.

What a speech! If anything could get you up and off to face the French, it’s surely inspirational words such as these:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today who sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
…gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here
And hold their manhoods cheap…

Laurence Olivier famously delivered this call to arms in the 1944 film of the play, made as a morale-booster for the war effort. However, for me there is no better delivery than this mesmerising performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 1989 version. Watch this, and allow yourself to be fired up, but please resist the temptation to hit a Frenchman!

PS almost certainly apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless, is the claim that, in the real life speech, Henry V told his men that the French had boasted that they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every archer, so that he could never draw a longbow again. After the battle, English archers were showing French captives those fingers as if saying “See – my fingers are still here”. This is now known as the “V” for victory gesture!

Kenneth Branagh, Henry V
Literature

G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

Leave a comment

G K Chesterton is best known for his series of quirky stories about amateur sleuth and Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown. However, it is his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday which is for me his abiding masterpiece, a piece of literature I have returned to perhaps five or six times in order to recapture its delicious prose and otherworldliness. I even put this old and wonderfully designed book cover onto a T-shirt!

 

At first glance, The Man Who Was Thursday is a suspenseful mystery story, a thriller, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no mere detective story; little is as it seems in this mystery, and we find ourselves in deeper waters than expected. The novel’s subtitle offers us a clue to this: A Nightmare.

Gabriel Syme is a poet and a police detective; Lucien Gregory, a poet and bomb-throwing anarchist. At the beginning of the novel, Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and gets himself elected to it as “Thursday,” one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, in the sudden full knowledge of a hamstrung and petrified Gregory.

Syme soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and even as the masks come off, the biggest question – for both the reader and the characters – is who is Sunday? What is the true identity of the larger than life character who is the supreme head of the anarchists? The story unfolds thrillingly, and throughout it all we are treated to Chesterton’s exuberant prose, clever dialogue and gripping style. His wit shines through every scene.

Let’s read an example of this style, and how Chesterton constructs a creeping sense of jeopardy. Syme, the detective who is disguised as a poet, has engaged the anarchist Gregory and, on condition of having sworn himself to absolute secrecy, is taken to meet the highly dangerous anarchist council. Just prior to the arrival of the rest of the anarchists, Syme lets Gregory into his own secret…

“Gregory, I gave you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same kind?”

“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.

“Yes,” said Syme, very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to the anarchists?”

“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”

“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you swear?”

Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said abruptly—

“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”

Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.

“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard.”

Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.

“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.

“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear your friends coming.”

G K Chesterton
Music

Barbara Bonney sings Schubert’s Ave Maria (1994)

2 Comments

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to hear Schubert’s Ave Maria being rehearsed for a forthcoming wedding in the glorious surroundings of Ripon Cathedral. The loftiness of the cathedral’s Gothic architecture provided a fitting acoustic resonance to showcase such a lofty piece of music.

Franz Schubert composed the piece in 1825, and actually it wasn’t technically an Ave Maria at all (an “Ave Maria” being music written specifically as a prayer to the Virgin Mary and for use in the liturgy) but was called Ellens dritter Gesang (Ellen’s Song), and was part of his Opus 52, a series of settings based on Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake. It didn’t take long, however, for the composition to develop into the “all-purpose” Catholic piece that’s so popular today (although many conservative Catholics won’t play it at weddings or funerals precisely because it’s non-liturgical).

Anyway, it is popular for good reason. It has a wonderfully lilting refrain and offers the right singer an excellent vehicle with which to approach sonic beauty. It’s been sung by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Beyoncé, but for real fulfilment of its potential, it calls out for a full, round and rich soprano voice. To that end, listen to this version by American soprano, Barbara Bonney. Less of a household name perhaps than Maria Callas, say, or Joan Sutherland, but nevertheless Barbara Bonney exhibits an immaculate artistry on this recording of Ave Maria.

Barbara Bonney

 

 

Film, TV, and Theatre, Poetry

W H Auden’s Night Mail (1936)

4 Comments

In the 1930s, a group of British filmmakers, led by John Grierson, under the aegis of the GPO Film Unit, was behind an influential output of documentary films that became known as the British Documentary Film Movement. Of the films it produced, the best known and most critically acclaimed was Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936), featuring music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. Auden wrote his poem especially for the documentary, which follows the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland. The poem acts as a sort of verse commentary over the footage of the steam locomotive, and helped to establish the documentary as something of a classic.

Auden’s language is ingenious; glorious use of metaphor and clever rhymes, four-beat lines rhythmically delivered to mimic the pumping of the rods and pistons of the locomotive. You can almost hear the train chugging along. The personified train is efficient, reliable, steadfast, trustworthy – there is a remit, after all, to sell the merits of the postal service, and Auden satisfies the spec. As the pace picks up to match the acceleration of the train, the rhymes become quick and punchy, and become internal rhymes (Letters of thanks, letters from banks) rather than line-end rhymes; a rapper’s delight.

And read along here:

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Auden and Britten

Film, TV, and Theatre

Peter Sellers plays Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove (1964)

Leave a comment

Stanley Kubrick’s blackest-of-black comedy film, Dr Strangelove, was conceived as a straight thriller, based on Peter George’s book about the threat of nuclear war, Red Alert. The director, however, increasingly found himself struck, during the writing process, by a persistent comedic thread that suggested itself and which eventually forced him to embrace and run with it. A good thing too…and there could have been no better way to run with this comedic element in the fledgling movie than to engage Peter Sellers’ services.

Kubrick had worked with Sellers on Lolita, and it was probably Sellers’ display of characterisation in that movie that motivated Columbia Pictures to insist on casting him in Dr Strangelove in multiple roles. Sellers plays three characters: US President, Merkin Muffley; wheelchair-bound, ingenious mad German scientist, Dr Strangelove; and – the subject of this blog post – British RAF exchange officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.

The portrayal of Mandrake is a brilliant display of understated comedic acting. The slowly-dawning realisation that his commanding officer, General Ripper (himself brilliantly played by Sterling Hayden), has become unhinged and paranoid and has put in motion a seemingly unstoppable series of events that will culminate in nuclear conflagration; his desperation to extract from Ripper the “recall code” to bring back the nuclear bombers that are swiftly on their way to Russia; and his frantic efforts to contact the President and to avoid nuclear apocalypse when he finds he might hold the only key to do so…Sellers’ duty-bound and stiff-upper-lipped group captain is a performance of sheer genius.

There is such a plethora of superbly written and delivered lines that there are too many to single out. Take ten minutes to enjoy them all – as I guarantee you will – in this montage of Mandrake scenes.

Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964). Credit: Sony Pictures. Playing 5/22-5/28.

Film, TV, and Theatre, Music

Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, as used in Brief Encounter (1945)

Leave a comment

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto in C Minor stands on its own as a masterpiece of the late Romantic period, but what a great idea it turned out to be, to pair it with David Lean’s classic love story of 1945, Brief Encounter.

It was Lean’s collaborator, producer Noël Coward, on whose one-act play the film was based, who insisted on the use of his favourite piece of music, despite there being a composer, Muir Mathieson, waiting in the wings to write an original score. With all due respect to Mathieson and however his score might have turned out, the use of Rachmaninoff, played by Australian pianist Eileen Joyce and the National Symphony Orchestra, raised the film’s emotional level sky-high.

The film is told in flashback, as the lead character of Laura (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room with her husband, staring into space, listening to the Second Concerto and thinking about her time with another man, Alec (Trevor Howard). She remembers the day they met, at the café in the train station. When a piece of grit gets in her eye, Alec, a doctor, removes it, and a bond starts between them, quickly developing into love as they  embark on a series of clandestine assignations.

This love story is doomed, of course, as Laura is a married mother and we are deep in the territory of 1940s middle-class manners. Granted, the strait-jacketed morals and linguistic quirks of the times leave us in no doubt that the film is a period piece, but it rightly remains a hugely popular British movie.

The development, and inevitable demise, of the relationship is subtly underpinned by the repeating strains of Rachmaninoff’s music. The enduring popularity of his piece, meanwhile, is demonstrated by its consistently topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, firmly securing its status as Britain’s favourite piece of classical music. Watch and listen to a pleasing montage of Brief Encounter to Rachmaninoff’s music below:

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard

Art

Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499)

1 Comment

The Virgin Mary has featured prodigiously in Christian art for many centuries. There are numerous genres of her depiction including the familiar Madonna and Child, and the Madonna Enthroned, the Adoring Madonna, the Madonna of Humility, and several others.  One such, the Pietà (Italian for “pity” or “mercy”), is a subject that depicts the sorrowing Virgin Mary cradling the dead Jesus, and is most often found in sculpture. Today’s subject is the Pietà of Michelangelo, completed in 1499 and residing in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.

There is no doubting the sublime genius that created this piece. Carved from a single block of Carrara marble, Michelangelo created, with consummate skill, a coherent and moving piece of art incorporating both Classical and Renaissance tendencies.

The figures are deliberately out of proportion owing to the difficulty of depicting an adult man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. When designing Mary’s measurements, Michelangelo could not impose realistic proportions and have her cradle her adult son as he envisioned, so he had to make her body oversized. To ameliorate this compromise on her form, Michelangelo carved out cascading sheets of draping garments, camouflaging her true fullness. The result is a triumph of form; observe the monumental drapery, the youthful face of Mary, the anatomical treatment of Christ’s elongated body…

Michelangelo was 24 when he completed this sculpture, and his fame became assured long before he completed his other masterpieces such as his David (completed 1504) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (completed 1512)

 

Michelangelo’s Pietà

Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature